The openSUSE Project is proud to announce the release of openSUSE 11.1. The openSUSE 11.1 release includes more than 230 new features, improvements to YaST, major updates to GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org, and more freedom with a brand new license, Liberation fonts, and openJDK. This is also the first release built entirely in the openSUSE Build Service. Get it today!

To me it's a mess, Fedora 10 is actually a more polished experience, they use KDE4.1 defaults, packagekit is nice Qt4 and nice oxygen icons for showing updates and such. IMHO this is not the best release for Opensuse from a KDE point of view which is sad saying they are a more KDE centric distro.

It isn't easy to make KDE4 look good. At this point, the "stable" 4.1 version still lacks a lot of features that we take for granted in a Desktop and it crashes a lot under stress. OpenSUSE developers probably decided to use the less problematic features and hide everything else.

Oh, shit. This is why I don't post here anymore. Dumbass fanboys come and mod me down because I describe the thing that gives them a hard-on too accurately, and they realize it actually is fugly. After all, KDE4 works so well in their hallucinations. Why do I have to spoil their deviant fun?

Listen, if you don't want to hear that 4.1 is alpha quality, hide your head under your pillow, because that's the truth. By the way, if your head is a KDE panel, you will have to wait until 4.2. Your eyes will stay floating in the air in an ugly black square for a while, though.

Hey, don't look at me like that, your face is all pixelated like a rotated KDE widget.
I sense a smell... Oxygen? Ozone?... No... More like SO2.

Dumbass fanboys come and mod me down because I describe the thing that gives them a hard-on too accurately, and they realize it actually is fugly. After all, KDE4 works so well in their hallucinations. Why do I have to spoil their deviant fun?

Why do people argue with moderation? The fact is, people mod you down if they dont agree with you. So if you're still whining about that, just accept that your view is a minority amongst those who read it.
People are allowed to disagree with you. Live with it.

Listen, if you don't want to hear that 4.1 is alpha quality, hide your head under your pillow, because that's the truth. By the way, if your head is a KDE panel, you will have to wait until 4.2. Your eyes will stay floating in the air in an ugly black square for a while, though.

If you actually TRIED opensuse 11.1 you would realise that hiding the taskbar is a feature that has been backported form KDE 4.2 by openSUSE.

KDE 4.2 is a LOT better than 4.1.3 IMO and for me it has been 99% stable enough to use daily.

I'll still upgrade to openSUSE 11.1 - mainly for the underlying infrastructure and yes, YAST. It works for me

Listen, if you don't want to hear that 4.1 is alpha quality, hide your head under your pillow, because that's the truth.

How do you define alpha quality exactly, because open source software has always stabilised and acquired new features that attracted users at varying rates?

Meanwhile, I just installed KDE 3.5 within OpenSuse until I could see that a KDE 4.x did everything I wanted and had the right number of applications ported and refused to get into arguments with idiots who were trying to make it sound as if that situation would never be reached. That's what you're doing.

Personally I think it's the worst job of KDE they have made, they dont even use alot of the KDE4.1.x defaults which KDE devs have made for you to see.

So? That's what a distribution is for: Change the defaults to its audience. There is no setting that fits everybody.

Aya default, it's ok but it's mostly gray,

Yes, and it fits SUSE's overall color scheme aka "corporate design".

No plasma icon for ZUI by default(reverted to Folder view desktop),

So? The openSUSE KDE Team thinks that turning it off by default is the best for its users. It's not as if it's forbidden to change it.

crystal icons in the kickoff menu(Hello, Oxygen for KDE4)

I don't know what you are talking about. I use 11.0 on my desktop PC since its release and 11.1 on my notebook since Beta 5 (due the Atheros drivers). I don't see any Crystal icons. Both installs were fresh -- not upgrades.

I keep reading about how good 10.3 was and that 11 wasn't up to par. What are you people referring to? I have 10.3 on my desktop since its release and I have 11 on all my other machines.

11 has been the best SuSE for me all around(I use suse for about 6 years). 10.3 had a lot of rough corners that took a lot of updating to polish.Also the software package manager is still the slowest I 've ever come across. On the other hand OpenSuSE 11 has the best Yast and blazing fast package manager ever! And seemed very polished to me. :|

Well I personally think that 10.3 was an amazing release, with the only downside being the slow package management & installtion. Of course I used a lot of things that are now difficult/broken like using Parallels to virtualize WinxP.

11.1 is good, but 11.2 and 11.3 should be even better as the KDE team focuses on stabilisation instead of adding features. One of the nice things about 11.1 is also that the frequent Dolphin crashes of KDE 4.0 are gone.

For me, 11.1 isn't up to par because of the complete weirdness that is installing ATI drivers and running on a dual-headed machine.

With the open source ATI drivers, I could get the dual-head mode to sort of work, but the background image wouldn't show up on the second monitor. With the ATI drivers, I could get both monitors to work correctly, but then KDE had a functionality fart and kept randomly changing my my keyboard layout and tools and icons on the panel.

I realize that a lot of onus lies with ATI too, but OpenSuSE should really extend their polish to the installation of commercial video drivers. If Ubuntu can make it as easy as the click of a button, OpenSuSE should be able to as well.

I noticed some other little problems (like the inability to set NTP servers during installation even though the option to do so is listed on the screen, and the lack of JFS support), but the ATI driver issues killed it for me. If I'm going to have to spend hours configuring my system anyway, I'd rather run Debian or Slackware.

1. Microsoft Recommends SLES/SLED. Neither of these are openSUSE. Microsoft has no connection whatsoever with openSUSE.
2. Microsoft is just as likely to sue you as any other user of any other Linux distro. The agreement between MS and Novell did NOT cover openSUSE.
3. Novell is simply doing business. If RedHat were to agressively try to win customers from novell would you stop using Fedora? Does it even have any relevance? So long as Novell is in business openSUSE is going to receive a lot of high quality attention and polish.

No matter what distro you use, you will be using software that Novell has contributed to. And you will probably like those contributions.

I'm sick of people sprouting complete crap about the MS-Novell deal. The first 2 points you made were completely false. The 3rd was simply a troll.

And to answer the original post, I believe the poster is referring to "upstart" - originally created by Ubuntu. It does have some advantages over the normal linux boot method but speed is not necessarily one of them. I believe openSUSE 11.1 would boot just as quick as the latest fedora/ubuntu, due to improvements in starting services in parallel and starting X earlier in the process.

You can mod me down but you won't make me shut up. I will continue to defend Suse and I will continue to recommend it until Novell will die or until Novell will completely merge with Microsoft (more likely to happen). Until then I wish you all the best (including Suse).

Dude, do you have a double personality? That comment you wrote, which got modded down, looked an awful lot like a Novell-hating comment, and now you say the Novell haters modded you down? I'm betting you actually got modded down by people who believed you were irrationally hating on Novell. Either that, or you were intending to be sarcastic and it didn't come across that way.

SUSE (backed by Microsoft) is playing an evermore irellevant part in the the Linux Systems I encounter. The Choice I see is Ubuntu(sigh) for the DEsktop and RHEL for the Server.

On a personal note, I won't touch it with a 40ft Bargepole after 2 days on a customer site battling with YAST and its insistence of doing things its way.
Eventually, we installed CENTOS and in 2 hours everything was up and working and has been for the past 2 years. Up to then I was pretty ambivalent about what Linux Distro to use. I have even been known to use Slackware at times.

Suse/SLES/OpenSuse configuration has traditionally a lot of differences to the common Linux System. So yes, many times you are better off using Yast as some plain config files aren't there or do not work as expected. This is what puts me off every time but it might make perfect sense to a long-term OpenSuse user.

Which deal? There's more than one.
The support coupons MS sells with corporate Windows licenses only cover SLE.
The cross-patent agreement covers companies, not specific distributions and because MS never proved that Linux in general is even affected by those patents, it's not an issue for FOSS users.

Yes. It's called KickOff <http://en.opensuse.org/Kickoff> and is ported to KDE 4 since 4.0. It was even the first application launcher for KDE 4 and it's still the default.
There are, however, in true KDE style more choices. A Classic K-Menu is there as well and with KDE 4.2 Lancelot <http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/main> is shipped as an option, too.

I just installed it today on a test partition and I have to say it's very nice. The default KDE desktop is ok but with a little tweaking I have it set up the way I like it. Nvidia drivers are hosted on Nvidia's servers just add the repo through one click install at http://en.opensuse.org/NVIDIA. The only trouble I had was getting the network up after boot. I had to disable ipv6 and set the host name rather than have it set via dhcp. Other then that they do a great job of integrating gtk qt3 and qt4 apps. No rpm hell yet and yast is better that ever. I haven't had to use the command line to configure anything although I did drop into a different runlevel to restart X and networking. I'm impressed and I applaud the opensuse community for a job well done.

There are certifications for Novell products, including SLES on their site www.novell.com. Expect something similar and analogous to Red Hat certifications, but I never needed any certifications so I can't give you more insight.

Suse has been traditionally a KDE distro but today you can use both WM's since they provide Gnome too with equal care. Actually on their Server products and their SLED(Enterprise Desktop) they default to Gnome.

About the SELinux question you asked, I didn't quite get what you are trying to say. Their offer for enhanced security policies is AppArmor and is much easier(and different) than SELinux. Although recently there was talk that they are going to support SELinux also. Rumor has it they are going to drop apparmor but I haven't followed this issue any further and don't know the latest facts.